Book Series Guide

Kōbō Abe

Author guide

Kōbō Abe Books in Order

Kōbō Abe (1924–1993), born Kimifusa Abe, was a Japanese novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and filmmaker. A physician by training, he became one of postwar Japan’s leading avant-garde writers. His fiction frequently uses surreal, speculative, and absurdist situations to examine identity, isolation, language, bureaucracy, and the unstable boundary between reality and imagination. His best-known novels include The Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another, The Ruined Map, The Box Man, Secret Rendezvous, The Ark Sakura, and Kangaroo Notebook. He also wrote influential plays, poetry, criticism, screenplays, and experimental prose, and founded the Abe Studio theater company.

surrealismabsurdist fictionexistential fictionscience fictionmodernist fictionavant-garde theaterplayspoetryessaysliterary criticism

Catalog record updated .

Not sure where to begin?

Start with one of these

Cover of The Woman in the Dunes

The Woman in the Dunes

A definitive and accessible entry point into Abe’s surreal, existential fiction.

Cover of The Box Man

The Box Man

A concentrated example of Abe’s experimental narrative style and recurring concerns with identity and social isolation.

Outside the series

Bibliography by category

Novels (16)
  1. At the Guidepost at the End of the Road

    novel · 1948

  2. The Wall: The Crime of S. Karuma

    novella · 1951

  3. Starving Unions

    novel · 1954

  4. Beasts Head for Home

    novel · 1957

    In the aftermath of World War II, Kuki Kyūzō, a Japanese youth raised in the puppet state of Manchuria, struggles to return home to Japan. What follows is a wild journey involving drugs, smuggling, chases, and capture. Kyūzō finally makes…

  5. Inter Ice Age 4

    novel · 1959

    In near-future Japan threatened by the melting of the polar icecaps, Professor Katsumi develops a computer that can predict human behavior. Unfortunately for the Professor, the computer predicts that he will oppose a new government…

  6. Stony Eyes

    novel · 1960

  7. The Woman in the Dunes

    novel · 1962

    The Woman in the Dunes, by celebrated writer and thinker Kobo Abe, combines the essence of myth, suspense and the existential novel. After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered…

  8. The Face of Another

    novel · 1964

    The Japanese novelist Abe has often been compared to Kafka and this 1966 novel suggests an elegantly chilling postscript to "The Metamorphosis." Abe's narrator is a scientist who has been hideously deformed in a laboratory accident, a man…

  9. The Traitor

    novel · 1965

  10. The Double of Human Being

    novel · 1966

  11. The Ruined Map

    novel · 1967

    Of all the great Japanese novelists, Kobe Abe was indubitably the most versatile. With The Ruined Map, he crafted a mesmerizing literary crime novel that combines the narrative suspense of Chandler with the psychological depth of…

  12. The Box Man

    novel · 1973

    'This is the record of a box man' The streets of Tokyo have been seeing a strange phenomenon recently - people who have decided to live their lives in a box on the street. Behind their cut-out eyeholes, they sit and watch from behind…

  13. Secret Rendezvous

    novel · 1977

    As a jump-shoe salesman searches for his wife in a sinister underground hospital, his fascination with the hospital's strange inhabitants, including a girl whose bones are gradually liquefying, causes him to barely notice his wife's…

  14. The Ark Sakura

    novel · 1984

    Mole has converted a huge underground quarry into an "ark" capable of surviving the coming nuclear holocaust and is now in search of his crew. He falls victim, however, to the wiles of a con-man-cum-insect-dealer. In the surreal drama…

  15. Kangaroo Notebook

    novel · 1991

    An ordinary man finds himself caught in the power of bizarre and unpredictable forces when he discovers one morning at breakfast that radish sprouts have begun to grow out of his shins

  16. The Flying Man

    incomplete-novel · 1994

Short fiction (5)
  1. The Invention of R62

    short-story-collection · 1956

  2. The Underwater City

    short-story-collection · 1964

  3. An Irrelevant Death

    short-story-collection · 1964

  4. The Dream Escape

    short-story-collection · 1968

  5. Beyond the Curve and Yupkechya

    short-story-collection · 1988

Essays and speeches (3)
  1. The Deserted Thought

    essay-collection · 1965

  2. The Frontier Within

    essay-collection · 1971

  3. The Whales Rushing Toward Death

    essay-collection · 1986

Poetry (2)
  1. Poems of an Unknown Poet

    poetry-collection · 1947

  2. Kidnap

    poetry-collection · 1978

Plays (8)
  1. Slave Hunting, The Speedy Ship, and Uniforms

    play-collection · 1955

  2. Friends and The Traitor

    play-collection · 1967

  3. The Man Who Turned into a Stick

    play-collection · 1969

  4. Involuntary Homicide

    play · 1971

  5. Loving Glasses Are Colored Ones

    play · 1973

  6. Green Stockings

    play · 1974

  7. Ue: New Slave Hunting

    play · 1975

  8. Abe Kōbō’s Theater: Seven Years of Development

    theater-nonfiction · 1979

Posthumous collections (1)
  1. Untitled: From the Story of a Medium

    posthumous-short-story-collection · 2013

Other (2)
  1. The Anti-Theater Person

    interview-collection · 1973

  2. The Laughing Moon

    prose-collection · 1975

Frequently asked questions about Kōbō Abe

What kind of writer was Kōbō Abe?

Kōbō Abe was a Japanese novelist, playwright, and theatrical producer-director known for avant-garde, surrealist, and absurdist writing about alienation, identity, and modern society.

Sources: amacad.org (opens in a new tab)encyclopedia.com (opens in a new tab)

What was Kōbō Abe’s real name, and where did he grow up?

Kōbō Abe was the pen name of Kimifusa Abe. Born in Tokyo in 1924, he spent his childhood in Mukden, Manchuria, now Shenyang, China.

Sources: ndl.go.jp (opens in a new tab)encyclopedia.com (opens in a new tab)

Did Kōbō Abe study medicine before becoming a writer?

Yes. He studied medicine at the University of Tokyo, earned his medical degree in 1948, and then pursued literature rather than practicing medicine.

Sources: encyclopedia.com (opens in a new tab)shinchosha.co.jp (opens in a new tab)

Which writers and ideas influenced Kōbō Abe?

His influences included Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, and Friedrich Nietzsche. He also drew on European surrealism, existentialism, and Marxism.

Sources: encyclopedia.com (opens in a new tab)washingtonpost.com (opens in a new tab)

What awards did Kōbō Abe win, and why is he remembered?

He received major honors including the Akutagawa Prize, the Yomiuri Literary Prize, and the Tanizaki Junichiro Prize. He is remembered as a leading postwar Japanese avant-garde writer whose work achieved lasting international recognition.

Sources: shinchosha.co.jp (opens in a new tab)ndl.go.jp (opens in a new tab)encyclopedia.com (opens in a new tab)